One of the core principles of cataloging is to catalog with the user in mind. The search needs of patrons when searching in institutional repositories are different from that of traditional research in library catalogs and discovery layers. An institutional repository aims to promote, showcase and market the innovative scholarship produced by faculty and staff at a particular academic institution. A potential user may wish to find all the scholarship produced by an institution, its colleges and departments, or its individual researchers. Or a patron may wish to see what a cross section of faculty are producing in a specific area, subject or topic. Because of these specific user needs, authority control of both names and subjects is vital for the accessibility of resources and for the satisfaction of the end users. Authority control in institutional repositories is particularly important but it is often lacking. A successful search by the patron is determined by the ability to find research assets by creator name, their academic and unit affiliations, and by subject headings in the search bar. Authority control also enables access points/hyperlinks within individual bibliographic records to link to other records and resources with similar metadata. And finally, these forms of consistent metadata ensures interoperability between institutional repositories and traditional discovery layers. This presentation seeks to illustrate the importance of authority control, both name and subject, in general, and how this librarian specifically instituted these features into his academic library’s institutional repository, Adelphi Scholarly Works, an instance of the platform, Esploro by Ex Libris.

Institutional repositories began as and continue to be repositories designed to primarily support text-based materials. However, the importance of supporting diverse collections and of showcasing the wide range of materials, works, and outputs across an academic institution necessitates the inclusion of non-textual materials and the development of outreach techniques to researchers and faculty members who produce work that is often difficult to collect and catalog. The Art Department at Colby College, a small, private liberal arts college in Maine, only represents 2.8% of the total faculty and student materials in the repository systems at Colby College, which include Digital Commons and JSTOR Forum. However, many of the faculty members are exhibiting artists. Students who participate in the Studio Art and in the Art History program create and showcase materials during their Senior Capstone that have been so far been underrepresented in the institutional collections. In the Spring of 2021, a new position was created at Colby College for a Scholarly Communications Librarian to further develop Colby College Libraries’ digital collections and to support the research and intellectual work of Colby Students and faculty. As part of this work, the new Scholarly Communications Librarian started to work with both the studio capstone program and an art faculty member to better capture, describe, and showcase their work. This is part of a wider goal to increase both material and departmental representation in the Colby College repository spaces, assess the pressure points and growth opportunities for the current repository infrastructures, and to increase the visibility of open access initiatives on campus. This presentation will discuss the work that has been done so far, specifically highlighting copyright and digital rights management considerations when working with artists, the lessons learned, and will conclude with an open discussion of the goals for further developing this initiative.

The nature of graduate student works has evolved in response to technological and academic changes. At the University of Florida, the Libraries work closely with the Graduate School to make terminal works available through the Institutional Repository (IR@UF). This presentation discusses the Libraries decision to establish Terminal Projects (TPs) as a category used to encompass traditional electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and other terminal projects (OTPs) that are required to complete a graduate degree at UF. To open discussion, I will compare and contrast UF's Graduate School output with graduate TPs from other colleges, schools, and departments. I will cover some structural factors at UF that led to the need for a super-category, encompassing ETDs and other projects at UF required to complete a graduate degree. Records analysis will test the hypothesis that the ratio of OTPs to TPs is growing. I will cover the challenges of looking for stats on a subject not built into any of the available data sources: our main catalog, metadata from the IR@UF, email, production folders, and a Microsoft Access tracking database. The rest of the discussion covers the current effort to standardize and streamline intake and tracking of OTPs. The tracking database grew from work on an Excel template intended to gather tracking data from the degree granting units (DGUs). This work inspired a new goal: working with DGUs to identify keywords or notes that would support global searches for their students' works. Adding such consistent terms can enable us to import data into the bibliographic records created by our cataloging unit, and export the same information to include in the tracking sy]stem. Having data points like author names, titles, degrees, and DGUs in the tracking system will enable smoother, more personalized support for authors and DGU staff.

Are you seeking new content for your repository? Are you eager to forge partnerships across campus? Come to this session for inspiration and practical tips for working with research centers. The University of Arkansas repository team will discuss successful strategies for - Outreach – recruitment, collaborating with fellow librarians, initiating contact - Hosting services – multi-format platform, discoverability through metadata, uploads, usage statistics - Promotion – social media, celebrating mutual achievements Note: This video presentation is platform agnostic.

Academic libraries rarely discuss cases of digital repositories that do not meet the standards expected of trusted digital repositories. Implications from inconsistent adherence to technical and professional criteria often surface during migration projects. In 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began migrating assets to a mono-repository environment. Persistent historical factors presented challenges to repository trustworthiness. This case study discusses a survey project to evaluate legacy repository statuses in the contexts of infrastructure, documentation, and staff capacity. It considers a paradigm of organizational accountability in digital asset stewardship and offers insights for reconciling inherited legacies with aspirations to be a trusted repository.

Academic Commons is the digital repository of Columbia University and its affiliated institutions. Currently over 32,000 works are accessible through this portal. However, finding new ways to add unique collections and their metadata to the institutional repository (IR) is a constant challenge. One of those unique collections are the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory Technical Reports, a set of scientific geoscience reports dating from 1949 to 2003. A cross-departmental team at Columbia University Libraries set out to digitize 298 of these technical papers comprising 32,597 pages and including 151 foldouts of various sizes. Metadata was already largely available through WorldCat and for this reason a workflow was devised that enabled the team to reuse that existing MARC metadata from OCLC WordCat and at the same time increase access and visibility of these resources by making them digitally available through WorldCat, HathiTrust, CLIO, (Columbia’s local integrated library system (ILS)), Internet Archive, and Academic Commons (the IR). This new workflow involves digitization of the original print reports, cataloging of the physical and digital copies, dynamically cross-walking (via HySync, an internal application) the MARC metadata from the ILS to a MODS-based format in Academic Commons, where the reports were assigned DOIs and made available for download. Since the collection was made available in the IR in September of 2020, the items have been viewed over 6,000 times and downloaded nearly 3,000 times. This presentation will outline the individual steps comprising the new workflow, from selection over digitization and cataloging to discovery, the benefits enabled by this collaboration across departmental lines, but also address the challenges encountered along the way.

Marketing our Argo IRCommons is no easy task. Though it has existed for almost a decade, its growth and progress has been stunted by the lack of consistent coordination and management. With a new manager and coordinator on board it was time to make changes that would foster new collections and faculty submissions in order to showcase the robust research of the university. In collaboration with the Argo IRCommons Manager we pulled together an aggressive approach to marketing and outreach that would include informing faculty about the IRCommons, proactively requesting recently published works, and bringing students into the conversation. In addition we would pay close attention to the inclusion of underrepresented POC, women in STEM,and non-traditional students wherever and whenever possible. Join me and learn more about our journey.

In 2016, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) began compiling a faculty bibliography in order to keep a comprehensive record of and showcase the institution’s research. Published in the institutional repository and positioned as a central project of the Scholarly Communication Initiatives (SCI) department, the bibliography serves as a marketing tool for the repository, open access, and research impact outreach, while also providing partnership opportunities across campus. Existing literature discussing faculty bibliographies frequently frames workflows around existing knowledge of programming to create these databases. Many scholarly communication departments don't have programming staff, or their access is limited to a campus and/or library IT department that cannot dedicate themselves to such a project. This was no different for UNLV, where the workflows for the bibliography were designed utilizing records obtained from faculty activity reporting software and research databases, often in spreadsheet format. The project was designed to establish the repository, and in turn the library, as the authoritative showcase for the research and creative efforts of UNLV faculty. During this session, we aim to discuss the lessons learned along the way, including missteps and obstacles, staffing changes required, improvements on the horizon, and ways we’ve needed to adapt workflows over the years. We will also discuss what resources we used (such as adapting examples from other institutions, OpenRefine, and campus stakeholders to obtain faculty annual self-reported scholarship data), and the methods we’ve used for assessing the success of the bibliography project (response rates and deposits, downloads from the institutional repository). Attendees will also be able to learn about how they could implement a similar project using their institutional repository and what they, and their institution, could gain by doing so.

This session will serve as a brief case study of how one college special collections unit navigated a particularly transitional year in which they faced an unparalleled increase in demand for digital collections access alongside a reduction of in-house technical support for their digital repository. As at other institutions, the COVID-19 pandemic majorly impacted the operations of Smith College Special Collections (SCSC), with a switch to remote teaching, cancelled fellowship visits, and physical collections that were suddenly inaccessible. To provide the remote access to archives and special collections needed to facilitate teaching and research, SCSC spun up a digitization-on-demand workflow. Using a pseudo “assembly line” model, SCSC digitized over 70,000 pages of material from over 1200 digitization requests between August 2020 and July 2021.

In January 2020, the Outreach and Engagement Team at the College of the Holy Cross began preparing a poetry walk, which was reconfigured to a social media “poetry event” due to COVID-19. With the anticipated return of students to campus for the Spring 2021 semester and a need for the community (especially students) to have recreational opportunities that were safe, socially distanced and preferably outside, the Team attempted for a second time to plan a poetry walk. CrossWorks, the institutional repository for the College, was a part of this plan from the beginning. Foremost, CrossWorks would support the scholarly and creative work of the community as a preservation and access tool for the project. Just as importantly however, the IR could serve as the means for members of the community who were still dispersed, not yet back to campus, or coming to campus infrequently to enjoy the walk virtually. The Outreach and Engagement Team collaborated with both academic and non-academic departments to assemble a mile-long loop through campus featuring original student poetry and poetry from the library’s Distinctive Collections. The project was very successful, with 600 downloads. It was also a great way to promote CrossWorks and solicit more scholarly work as the academic year came to a close. Most rewarding has been the feedback from students and faculty, who appreciated the poetry walk as a way to feel connected to campus and community despite the many ways people were disconnected.